Integrated Lesson Plans for I Like Pumpkins
Reading, Social Studies, Science, Art, Math Pumpkin Unit Activities
Oct 17, 2008
The charming trade picture book I Like Pumpkins by Jerry Smath [Cartwheel Books, 2003] can be used as the focus for lessons in reading, social studies, science, art, and math as part of an integrated pumpkin theme unit for younger elementary children.
Introduce and Share the Book
Display the book's cover and discuss the title and picture. Ask students to discuss the pumpkins in the picture and what has been done to them. Flip through the book and have students predict what it will be about. Read the book aloud and check predictions.
Reading Lesson: Brainstorm, Identify, and Use Adjectives to Describe Pumpkins
- Draw an idea web on chart paper with Words That Tell About Pumpkins in the center oval. Explain that adjectives are words that can tell what something looks or feels like. Have students brainstorm adjectives that describe pumpkins while you record the words on the idea web. To get them started, reread the first few pages of I Like Pumpkins and point out the adjectives tall, squat, big, round, squarish, nightmarish, real and plastic.
- For a lesson on opposite words (antonyms), work with students to pair the words in the book (tall/squat, round/squarish, real/plastic), generate opposite words for words from the book (big/small, tall/short), and think of pairs of opposite words not mentioned in the book (bumpy/smooth, fat/thin).
- For assessment, display pumpkins or pumpkin pictures and have students use adjectives to make up their own sentences to describe these pumpkins.
Social Studies Lesson: How Do People Use Pumpkins?
- Have students brainstorm some ways they know people use pumpkins while you record their suggestions in a list.
- Note that people in the book use real pumpkins and pumpkin-shaped items made by people in many different ways. Write Ways People Use Pumpkins on the board and draw two large pumpkin outlines underneath, labeled Real Pumpkins and Pumpkins Made by People. Work with students to sort their previous suggestions into these categories while you write each answer inside the appropriate pumpkin. Then have students identify and categorize ways pumpkins and pumpkin items are used in the book (such as being grown and sold for money, as scarecrow heads, as decorations, as punch bowls, as candy holders, as trick-or-treat buckets, as Halloween costumes, as lanterns, as food such as seeds and pies, and as dolls), while you record these in the pumpkins as well.
- For assessment, have students suggest reasons people use pumpkins in the above ways, such as to do work, for fun, and for food.
- For enrichment activities related to other uses for pumpkins, try lesson plans about imaginative inventions involving pumpkins or teaching basic economics concepts with pumpkin-related examples.
Science Lesson: How Do Pumpkins Grow?
Discuss the pictures in I Like Pumpkins of the girl and her mother picking pumpkins on a farm and the girl planting a pumpkin seed in her garden as the introduction to a science and reading lesson about how pumpkins grow.
Art Lesson: Pumpkin Art Activities
- Have students examine the book illustrations of people that resemble their pumpkins and draw their own people/pumpkin pairs on three pairs of blank cards. Have partners mix up the cards, trade sets with each other, and see if they can match people to pumpkins correctly.
- Provide students with small pumpkins, orange clay, or orange paper pumpkin shapes, and have them use the book illustration of pumpkins painted to look like school kids to make their own pumpkins that look like themselves.
Math and Visual Perception Skills Activities
Use the activities at the back of this book as inspiration for creating fun activities for children to do to develop their math and visual perception skills:
- Provide students with cut-out pumpkin faces that have slight differences and have them identify which are identical. Then create model patterns of alternating pumpkin faces and have students finish or complete the patterns and create their own.
- Work with students to figure out which farmer has picked the most pumpkins. Then use paper pumpkin shapes of various sizes to create on a bulletin board your own pyramids of picked pumpkins, and discuss ways you can tell at a glance which pyramid has the most pumpkins (large pumpkins take up more space, etc.).
Leave I Like Pumpkins out in a reading corner with the rest of the materials from this lesson for students to reread and work more with at their leisure. Suggest that students add other pumpkin uses to your class list as they think of them over time.
